Child of Darkness-L-D-2 (23 page)

There was no reply. The Guild members stared up at her, something akin to shame on each face.

“Go,” Cedric said, gesturing to the door. “Rest yourselves and report to the Great Hall in the morning, rather than to your respective Guild halls.”

“Will they return?” Ayla asked quietly as she watched them file out of the throne room. Cedric nodded grimly. “They will return. We are doomed.”

She waited until he had prepared for bed before going to him. She could not stand to see the pained way he would move, or the trouble he would have caring for himself. She could not stand to see it, because she knew that despite whatever pleading she could do, despite threats and forbidding him going, he would do as he pleased, and likely die in the fight.

For days now, she had feared it longer than that, she had feared his eventual death, but had comforted herself with the knowledge that the time was far off. Now it was so close, a certainty in her mind. And she would not fight it. All things came in their season, he’d told her. And that was a sentiment inspired by his God. Ayla had rarely asked him about the strange God he worshipped, and acted purposefully distant when he’d chosen to share. Now she felt a pang of guilt; she should not have been so selfish. But he—his God, perhaps—had been correct. All things did come to pass in their season, and the summer of Malachi’s life was now over.

She could keep him a while longer. Forbid him from fighting her war, lock him in the dungeon until the danger had passed. Force him to travel Upworld with her guard, where he could easily pass for Human and never be suspected otherwise.

She could keep him until he died in his bed, gray and withered limbs of a dead tree. Or, she could let him have this glorious death, and remember him forever as he was. He lay in his bed, propped up on the cushions, the posture making his injuries bearable. The healer had been back and wrapped the wounds on Malachi’s chest and arm in new bandages, which stood out stark white against his dark honey skin. His eyes opened when she entered the room; he did not smile at her.

“You have come to forbid me from fighting.” His jaw was set as steel. “I will not listen.”

“I know you will not.” She walked toward him slowly, giving him time to understand, to let the anger die in him.

“Then why do you bother?” He had planned for this confrontation, and now that it was being taken from him, he did not like it.

She looked down to hide her smile. “I do not.” When she looked up at him again, her throat closed, the tree of her life force choked with an emotion like thorny ivy. “I have come to let you go.”

He rolled his eyes toward the ceiling, made a growling noise in his chest. “You have come to say goodbye?”

“Yes.” There was no sense in denying it. “I believe that this is the last time we will spend alone together, and I do not wish to waste it bickering over something we both know you will do whether I forbid it or not.”

“And no matter how I argue otherwise you would not believe that I will be fine.” He let out a heavy sigh. “Ayla, I have gone to battle a hundred times. I fought in the Great Fall. That should count for something.”

She pulled back the bedclothes and slid in beside him. He made room for her, despite his foul temper.

“If you believe I am going to die,” he prodded, “then why are you so calm? Do you not care about me after all?”

“I care to remember you as a kind mortal, not an infuriating Demon.” She could not help her smile, though he hid his well. “I do not know where this peace has come from. Perhaps it is because I will not be surprised by our doom, that I have come to accept it.”

When he did not answer her, she lapsed into silence. Then, as if spurred on by a question he had not asked, she continued, “I have told you of my time in the dungeon, what I experienced there? And what was revealed to me when Garret struck me down in our duel above Sanctuary?”

He made a noise that could have been an indication to continue, and so she chose to interpret it as such. “The Goddess told me that it would not be myself that brought the change that would save my race, but that it would be Cerridwen, though I did not know her by name then.”

“Cerridwen is a…she is with the Elves.” He carefully avoided calling her a traitor. “Do you believe she will care about the fate of your race if she allies herself with your enemies?”

“We have not always been enemies. Perhaps there is a reason that only fate knows for why she has turned away from us.” The darkness crept back over her, and though she fought it, she could not help adding, “Perhaps I am to blame and I have befouled the plans of the Gods with some mistake I have made.”

“I do not believe that,” Malachi said impatiently.

Ayla shook off the gloom that had descended, as if the matter of life and death—their lives, their deaths—that they now discussed was nothing more than a trivial conversation between two mates as they settled into bed. “No matter. There is a plan in all of this, and I accepted that when I accepted my throne. I did not see it then, but I do now—if I am alive, our daughter cannot fulfill her destiny.”

He raised an eyebrow in wan skepticism.

“Do not look at me that way,” she huffed defensively. “I do not say this because I am already defeated in my mind. I say it because it is true. As long as I live, Cerridwen is merely the Royal Heir. How is she to lead her race out of Human bondage if she is not their leader?”

It was Malachi’s turn for darkness. “Perhaps the same way her mother did. Perhaps her allegiance with the Elves will have the same results as your allegiance with me. She might think to kill you and claim the throne.”

That thought had not occurred to her, and something in her chest tore imagining it. Her own child would wish to strike her down? Never.

But she had killed her own mate, had she not? The one person who’d shown her any preference, any true attention?

“I will not compare myself to Garret,” she said, to Malachi and to herself, to stop that irrational thinking. “And you should not, either. Am I as cruel as he? Remember—” she ran her hand down his stomach, over the tight, puckered scars there “—how he tortured you? Do you think I could do such a thing to our child?”

He hissed and caught her hand. “This is another kind of torture, altogether.” The flash of humor in his eyes was too brief, replaced too soon by something else. “I think that if Cerridwen wished you dead, you would willingly die for her.”

“As would you,” Ayla noted, laying a hand gently over the bandage at his chest. “Our season is passing, Malachi. Can you not feel it?”

He covered her hand with his own. “I can.”

Tears sprung to her eyes, and that disappointed her. She did not wish to feel sadness at this moment. She gave them a chance to subside. “I do not fear. You say that we will not be parted—I believe you. You have fought through worse than death to reach me before.”

“And I would do it again.” He tipped her face up to his, covered her mouth with his. There was nothing more that needed to be said. He would die. And she did not know how long she would live without him. She might rally from her grief and live for many years. It seemed more likely that she would fade away with the sadness of his passing. But she feared the separation of death less, now that she was certain she would follow.

The training was long, and difficult. Not physically, but for Malachi, having to explain to them the nuances of battle they had not been taught before was difficult. Asking them to fight according to a plan, rather than to their independent impulses, was much more difficult a task than he had expected. And the Weaponscrafters, who could fight, but did not, as a rule, had their own troubles adjusting. But it had turned out all right in the end, by his estimation, and it seemed that even Cedric had been pleased with the results.

“I am impressed,” he’d said, though his voice had lacked the animation Malachi was used to hearing in it. Ayla had told Malachi how Cedric had lost his woman, and the thought of that loss fairly burned Malachi when he looked at him. He prayed the sorrow would not hinder the skill he knew that Cedric possessed.

They had left the Great Hall together, just as tables were set up for the night’s dining. “I will rejoin you at the feast,” Malachi had told Cedric. “Tell Ayla not to worry, that I will return. I have something I must see to myself.”

He’d left Cedric before he could be questioned, and kept his head down as he’d left the Palace. He did not know the way, exactly, by heart; Ayla did not often go, herself, and she was even less inclined to take him. But he followed the symbols marked high on the tunnel walls, and at last, he came to Sanctuary.

He had been there once, maybe twice before, and the sight of it, looming green and peaceful beyond the crumbling brick archway, stopped him.

This place was sacred. It pulsed with an energy of the divine that even he could feel, though it did not originate with his God. He had lived among the Faeries, but not for long, when compared to the length of their lives. And they did not accept him—what of their Gods and Goddesses?

He did not wish to show disrespect, but as he had not disclosed his intentions tonight with anyone else, he had not thought to question whether his trespass in this holy place would cause offense.

Slowly, cautiously, he slipped off his shoes, watching the gaping green mouth for any sign of Faeries inside. But there were none, it seemed; they had all fled through the holes in the metal grates that normally seemed like the bars of a cage, not as a venue of escape. He picked his way carefully down the ruined stairs that, a long, long time ago, had carried Humans down to their underground trains. How strange that now the place was overrun by the nature they destroyed for their convenience.

The air here was warmer, and sticky-wet, owing to the trees and grass that were vacant from the rest of the Underground. It was a pleasant feeling, despite Malachi’s unease and the pervasive feeling of being somewhere he should not. He stepped onto the lush green carpet, followed the worn-in path the led into the trees. Something in the canopy overhead rustled; Ayla had told him of the signs she’d received here, and he wondered if such a sign might appear to him now, to warn him away. But nothing revealed itself, and if the presence he felt all around him did not wish him to be there, it did not seem intent on showing him. The path split, diverging off into clusters of growth so thick that Malachi wondered how anyone, Faery or not, could pass through, into clearings, into arched, canopied tunnels of green that mocked the Underground world surrounding Sanctuary in bleakness. But Malachi sought one place, the place where he had been before, with Ayla. In the days after her coronation, after the furor had died down over the outcome of the duel between Garret and the new Queene—the Court had not wholly supported her then—she had kept him a secret. They had not appeared together at royal audiences. She had not allowed him to leave her chambers, for the most part. But she had, through the use of hidden passages in the Palace, led him out late in the night, and brought him to Sanctuary. He remembered the heady feeling of it, being invited into a place so special to her. She had stripped off her Court garments and flown, high above the trees, delighting in the freedom she did not have, had never had, because the captivity that had defined her life as a poor Guild member had simply changed to a new, more regal form. He’d stood on the grass, wings carefully concealed, and watched her, not in envy, but in gratitude to fate that he had lived to be with her. And at that moment, it had seemed like eternity was before them. After she’d tired of flying and returned to him, she’d led him to the pool in the center of the green haven, and she’d told him of the duel, and of her visions, and of the signs she had received that had comforted her while she had thought she was dying. And they had immersed themselves in the surprisingly clean water, and made love, and slept, and woke and spoke at length about the times that would follow: the birth of their child, the trials of being a Queene and her Consort, of war and responsibility, and all of those things that would intrude upon them.

That night had seemed to last forever, an eternity by itself, and yet it seemed so short a time now, on the brink of their impending separation.

So, it seemed to him that it was a magical place and he would find no better to conduct his intended ritual.

The water gurgled a welcome to him as he entered the clearing, talking in the way that water always seemed to. In the past, he had never understood it, but in the twenty years he’d lived among the Faeries, he’d learned some of the strange dialect. He crept cautiously into the space, regarding it as though it were the most holy cathedral, and knelt down. It took a long time to find the words. He had thought of what to say, how to be poetic and prayerful, as he’d walked here. But now, with the grass beneath his knees and the leaves rustling overhead, it sounded false.

“I do not know how to address you,” he admitted out loud, his stomach jumping at the shockingly loud echo of his voice in the space. He took a deep breath and continued. “I do not know if you are here. Ayla says that you are. She has faith. And I do not know where else you might go.

“You appeared to her. You showed her signs. And now I ask you to show me a sign. I am mortal. I will die tonight. It is a certainty, if I believe what she tells me. And though I was bound to the One God, I have lived too long away from him. I have fallen. I no longer know him. But I wish to know you.”

A strange emotion gripped him as the words left him, akin to relief. He felt hot tears on his cheeks, heard the ragged sobs of his breath torn from his chest. He lay on the ground, stretched out in a pose that had once meant supplication, but now only seemed an invitation, a call to the Earth beneath him to envelop him, body and soul.

“I wish to know you, so that I might not be lost after death. I want to walk with Ayla again. I want to see my daughter when order is returned to your Astral plane. I do not ask for immortality. I simply wish for a sign. I must know you are there! That something awaits me, something other than Hell and eternal torment!”

The cool of the grass pricking his face and the gentle bubbling of the water were the only answers he received. As he lay, motionless but for his racking sobs, they soothed him. In the still and quiet, the fear that had driven him here seemed almost foolish. It melted from him, mingling with his tears on the grass, pulling away from him a bit at a time, until he was not sure how long he had lain there, or what had compelled him to prostrate himself in this way to begin with.